SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Holiday wishes to SiteLines readers

Holiday greetings and warm wishes for a happy and healthy 2004! To recognize the contributions of clients, colleagues, students and over 2000 SiteLines subscribers -- many of whom have generously shared information and ideas with me over the last year, I thank you! This year, our holiday gifts go to the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the Family Service Association of Toronto, and the ABC Literacy Foundation of Canada.

News (Sites) You Can Use

The December 2003 issue of the Internet Resources Newsletter has a list of a dozen useful -- and often forgotten -- sources of announcements of Internet news and new web resources. Most of the resources are European services including SOSIG, the Resource Discovery Network, BUBL and JISC. The services are intended for subject specialists and librarians who need to stay up to date on new web resources, If you're interested, you can join the announcement lists and receive occasional updates by email.

Hundreds of University Policy Handbooks

Spotted on Research Buzz, the University Policy Handbook Index is a searchable collection of 950 policy handbooks from 691 universities and colleges in the U.S. This site will be particularly valuable to human resources professionals, policymakers, and contract negotiators.

Research 101

Research 101 is "an interactive online tutorial for students wanting an introduction to research skills. The tutorial covers the basics, including how to select a topic and develop research questions, as well as how to select, search for, find, and evaluate information sources."

Developed by the University of Washington Library, the site is deliberately NOT institution-specific. Please note that although I just came across this site, the site's copyright is dated 2001 and as a result some information might be out of date.

(Spotted on the El Dorado County Library's What's Hot on the Internet This Week)

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

A major effort to increase access to an important historical resource, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online provides access to the fourteen volumes of the print version of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

The first phase [of the Dictionary Online] presents persons who died between the years 1000 and 1920 or whose last known date of activity falls within these years. According to the supporting materials, biographies are fully searchable by keyword and volumes 2, 4-8, and 11-14 are accessible by identity/profession and volumes 2, 5-8, and 11-14 are accessible by geographic region. In addition to the basic html version, a Flash-enhanced version is also available from the main page.

Ghostwriting in Medical Journals

In the Sunday December 7 Guardian, Anthony Barnett's article "Revealed: how drug firms 'hoodwink' medical journals" describes a widespread practice where large drug companies hire medical writers to write review articles on particular drugs, then submit the articles to reputable medical journals with the claim that they are written by academics or physicians. Barnett suggests that "almost half of all articles published in journals are by ghostwriters." The article includes statements from medical writing firms confirming the practice, and one particularly striking example revealed by Dr. David Healey, an eminent UK psychiatrist, critic of the psychiatric drug industry and author of Let Them Eat Prozac.

The problem of medical ghostwriting is not particularly new. The CBC profiled the practice in a 2003 episode of Marketplace, and articles on ghostwriting can be found as early as 1994 in the PubMed database. The CBC site has a particularly good section of links to related articles on the topic, for further review.

Thank you Dan Dagostino of the University of Toronto Library for drawing the Observer article to my attention.

Recommended Resource: RePEc [Research Papers in Economics]

Part of the SOCIG project, RePec is "a collaborative effort of over 100 volunteers in 41 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. Any institution is welcome to join in contributing its research materials.

"All RePEc material is freely available. Please note that RePEc does not contain full-text journal articles; RePEc services provide links to many full text articles, but you may need a personal or institutional subscription to follow those links.

"The RePEc database holds over 209,000 items of interest, over 117,000 of which are available online: 120,000 working papers; 88,000 journal articles; 1,000 software components; 600 book and chapter listings; 3,700 author contact and publication listings; 7,300 institutional contact listings."

FLASH Tutorial for PubMed

The National Library of Medicine has created a Flash-enhanced tutorial on how to use PubMed. The tutorial is nicely laid out, with a sidebar menu of major sections. Each section is subdivided using a series of horozontal file tabs. Plenty of "show me" options enhance interactivity, along with exercises and suggested answers.

Recommended Resource: National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH)

North Americans often forget the wealth of English language resources from Europe and focus on North American-produced resources. The National Electronic Library for Health(NeLH) is one of those often-overlooked resources and deserves a place on your bookmark list. The electronic library is produced by the UK National Health Service, and attempts to provide health care professionals with medical information. Patient information is provided through the companion site NHS Direct Online, and the relationship between the two sites is similar to the Medline/MedlinePLUS sites in the US. Even the professional site's material is practical and useful for patients. A worthy addition to general medical and health link lists. (Spotted on RLG Shelflife, November 26 2003)

Think Like a Web Page

There is now an open link to my article "Think like a web page: 5 tips for smarter search engine searching.", published originally in the September 2003 issue of Informed Librarian.

Link Competition on the Web

Although it is now almost 18 months old, Winners don't take all: Characterizing the competition for links on the web by David Pennock, Gary Flake, Steve Lawrence, Eric Glover, and C. Lee Giles, remains an excellent study of how distribution of links to web sites approximates a "power law" where a small number of sites receive the majority of links, and always rise to the top of search engine results for a given keyword combination. The study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99(8): 5207-5211, is also available in synopsis form

The study notes that the competition for web links is particularly fierce in publications, entertainment, and consumer electronics topics. Although the paper doesn't directly mention Google or its PageRank methodology, which ranks partially by link frequency, one can easily make the connection and conclude that link competition will continue to devolve Google's PageRank methodology, making Google less and less suitable for serious information searches in popular topics.

Could Microsoft search your computer's files?

In Microsoft Aims for Search On Its Own Terms, Michael Kanellos describes Microsoft's experiment with "different search technologies that will, among other tasks, conduct Google-like searches on an individual's hard drive or categorize query results in different ways intended to make the data easier to digest."

Using this technology, the system "retrieves links, music files, e-mails and other materials that relate to applications running in the foreground." A Microsoft spokesperson describes the technology as "being able to retrieve a bunch of things without you explicitly asking for them."

If the technology could retrieve files based on the context of what you are working on now, it isn't a big stretch to think that the same technology might also conduct a web search and deliver web links based on the same contextual considerations.

Besides enabling Microsoft to fully undermine the utility of stand-alone search engines like Google by making its own software so easy to use, the prospect of such an invasive tool being built into an operating system has the sort of big-brother overtones that will likely raise privacy concerns among those who still care about such things.

If that's the idea (and Microsoft has persistently indicated that it wants to integrate web search into its next operating system), the idea is brilliant: Microsoft stands to enrich itself tremendously by persistently delivering external contextual content through a variety of revenue-producing streams. Harried computer users should find the convenience of integrated search irresistable, so this appears to be a strategy that can't miss.